This survey reviews the broad changes in U.S. trade policy over the course of the nation's history. Import tariffs have been the main instrument of trade policy and have had three main purposes: to raise revenue for the government, to restrict imports and protect domestic producers from foreign...

In the absence of distortionary tax and spending policies, freer immigration and trade for a country would often be supported by similar groups thanks to similar impacts on labor income. But government policies that redistribute income may alter the distributional politics. In particular,...

What are the gains from international trade? And how do immigrants influence this process? While economists have considered these questions before, particularly in the context of aggregate trade flows, there has been no work assessing the relation between immigration and international trade in...

Starting in 1985, Colombia experienced gradual trade liberalization that culminated in the drastic tariff reductions of 1990-91. This paper exploits these trade reforms to investigate the relationship between protection and wages. The focus of the analysis is on relative wages, defined as...

The beginning of the twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to explore the interaction of rapid technological progress and trade barriers in shaping the worldwide diffusion of a new, highly traded good: the automobile. We scrape historical data on the quantity and value of passenger...

We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on the importance of trade...

Although many modern studies find large and significant effects of prior colonial status on bilateral trade, there is very little empirical research that has focused on the contemporaneous impact of empire on trade. We employ a new database of over 21,000 bilateral trade observations during the...

In the 16th century, North America contained 25-30 million buffalo; by the late 19th century less than 100 remained. While removing the buffalo east of the Mississippi took settlers over 100 years, the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalo on the Great Plains were killed in a punctuated slaughter...

The last two centuries witnessed the rise and fall of empires. We construct a model which rationalises this in terms of the changing trade gains from empires. In the model, empires are arrangements that reduce trade cost between an industrial metropole and the agricultural periphery. During...